Wednesday, July 31, 2013

I finished this helicopter to use in my Modern Africa games. Now it is an Aérospatiale Alouette II Heller Kit, but I wanted some guns or rockets on it, so I added the rocket pods. The HAL Lancer is a variant on the Aérospatiale LAMA, so that was what I attempted to build.

Here is the kit.

Here is the actual helicopter.

I will say that it is very light, which is nice in building a flight stand. The problem is that it is a model, which means fragile, not to be touched, etc. I broke it in three places, just attempting to paint it. I ended up having to magnetize the blades after I broke them off.

Here is the finished kit. I should have left the cockpit detached to paint on its own, but this was a bit of a learning process for me.

Size comparison.

The flight stand, a little over nine inches of acrylic rod in a wine cork, glued to a washer.

Here is the finished product.

A detailed shot of the base. It has 2 large washeres for weight under the cork.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

I finished up a 15mm flatbed truck. I think it is a 2.5 ton Old Glory miniature with a Peter Pig ZPU-1 team, and a Battlefront DShK. I added caps to the crew so they fit in with the Peter Pig Hardened Militia that I have already painted. I also added the DShK and made a few extra boxes of ammo for the ZPU-1.

Here is what I was attempting to create.

Here are the finished conversions.

Here is the truck without weathering. I primed black, airbrushed a base coat of brown, built up the desert look. Here are the paints I used.

Here is the weathered look.

Here is the final product.

Working on a helicopter, and I still need to get a post with the professionals.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

We play in a group that usually has 5-8 participates in an evening. We need to get everyone a command, finish in three hours, and have fun. This means a convention style game every Thursday and finding rule sets that fit these parameters can be a challenge. We attempted Force on Force, it was fun but seemed to bog down with the number of commands we need. Are latest effort was using Gruntz, where each stand represented 1 Grunt. We had a lot of fun and the game worked well for our group. I think the Baron will put up a battle report on his blog. I spent of bunch of time making new stat cards, so here they are. Note I made these in Photoshop, and they are supposed to be 2.5" x 3.5" and that is how they look in MS Word, but here they seem a bit bigger.

Militia

I did many Google image searches to find the various pictures, I liked the Congo rebel wearing the wig, smoking, with a slung RPG the most of anything I found.

On the 2nd African Militia card, I added a Perk.

Regulars

Professionals

The sniper team has two perks, I am hoping we can read the small text during the game.

And last some extras. The transport is universal and I have not painted a T-55 yet, so it was just an experiment in playing with the values to see if a tank would work in the game.

I am sure there are errors in there somewhere, but it is better than what the online Gruntz card generator could give me. My professionals are done and I am working on some Land Rovers and a large flatbed truck.